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Champion’s Latest Viral Marketing Effort
Champion, the maker of men’s and women’s sportswear, recently debuted their newest viral effort, the Champion Hoodie Remix. The campaign centers around a microsite at hoodieremix.com that allows customers the opportunity to use a color palette and a number of pre-determined patterns to create their own hoodie design and share it with the world. So far there are over 53,000 original designs uploaded to the site, which is pretty massive. These aren’t just impressions - these are people that have ENGAGED with the brand.
Unfortunately, no matter how much you love your design, the chances are slim that it will ever be produced. Only one of the designs will be produced, and despite the voting system that’s set up, wisely, there are a number of criteria taken into account for the selection of the winner. The criteria include: 40% voting, 10% creativity, 10% originality, 24% spirit of the design/authenticity/style in relation to the Champion brand, 10% ease of manufacturing…and they even have a 6% weight for how viral you went with your design!
Even now, a month and a half before the contest deadline this promotion has resulted in a torrent of word-of-mouth marketing value for the Champion brand, which has lived in relative obscurity before this promotion. Being somewhat in the know about what the development costs for a site like this likely were, I’m willing to bet that this campaign has created a tsunami of return on marketing investment. It just goes to show you the power of going viral. Shameless plug alert: If you’re interested in going viral, we’d love to have the chance to talk to you about some of our viral marketing case studies and what we might be able to do for you.
Oh, and don’t forget to vote for one of my designs using this handly little widget that Champion has developed to aid in the process of taking their campaign viral:
Thanks @rdeal1 for bringing this one to my attention!
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PrettyLoaded
I ran across a pretty cool site that I had to share. It’s a website called PrettyLoaded and it’s devoted to showcasing preloaders - those little animations that you often see as a website’s graphics are loading. As internet connections get faster there’s less and less of a need for these preloaders, so a group of interactive designers created the site as an online museum of sorts for the beloved preloader.
Check the site out at http://www.prettyloaded.com, and follow the site on Twitter at @prettyloaded. You can even download the screensaver. But be warned, what you’ll see is both stunning and beautiful and you may not be able to get any work done once you get hooked.
Oh, and if you have the need for this kind of thing for your site, I know a group of talented individuals that would love to put something together for you! ; )
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Love
It’s true. I have fallen in love…with an automotive website. It’s a beautiful thing when engaging content collides with stunning design, and GoTryke accomplishes just that. It is billed as “where culture and transportation converge” and it delivers on that promise with daily news about the advancement of all different types of vehicles and the role they play in our culture. On top of all the great content, I think this is one of the most well-designed and intuitive sites in terms of user experience. It’s clutter-free and organized appropriately - and the advertising that pays for the site is organized in a way in which it’s not intrusive or obnoxious.
If you’re as interested in and intrigued by the automotive industry as we are, I highly recommend this as an addition to your RSS feed reader. You can add it by clicking this LINK.
You can also follow GoTryke on Twitter HERE. Tell them @garretohm sent you.
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Slide-rule Picassos, Newtonian Graphic Designers and Gatesian Warhols, Oh my!
Website design and development is a defined science and, at the same time, a practiced art. How is this so?
There are many potential comparisons to be drawn in positing an explanation. In broad terms, design is almost always a methodical, sometimes rhythmic process of anticipation and preparation. The anticipation of “what” is most frequently directly pulled from accounts of the past and/or indicators of future trends. Preparation is the right-sizing of appropriate measures to match, counter and/or complement the anticipated event; then categorizing and queuing up these “responses” to be best prepared to face the flow of inbound “requests”.
So where’s the science? Where’s the art? There is science in the measurements of past tendencies and future projections. Human behavior and demonstrated needs are empirically accountable. Ranked catalogues of these expectations are often derived from real, quantifiable data. Of course, where there are numbers, there is invariably a science attached to explain or validate them. From this perspective, it’s easy to see how statisticians and accounting-types can become a driving influence on design development for any process. But where’s the art in that?
Business requirements are, by definition, exactly that—the required end-product of an application or process relevant to a business goal. It stands to reason that it would seem elementary for numbers-types and process planners to rule the roost when choosing how and what to do with Website design. After all, hasn’t a certain Redmond, Washington-headquartered enterprise already addressed every possible business workflow?
That’s where the art comes in, especially the practiced application thereof. Website design is a union of the probable demand, anticipated response, and, hopefully, the enabled outcome. But what to do with the “in between”. Science and history define and enumerate the probable. It follows that if every element constituting “the probable” were categorically uniform and finite in variations, then the science-types wouldn’t have need for the artsy-types. Of course “the probables” are as infinitely and distinctly different as you and me, as unique in taste and perception as the fingerprints of those users that wear the buttons on their pointer mouse or track pad smooth with repeated use. Hence, the artsy-types get in the game.
The practiced art of Website design is the application of solutions known and unknown in proportional response to expected events, or “the probables”. Where art gets to differ from science is that applications of the most likely solutions to drive success can extend well beyond categorical definitions. And, in the practice of harmony, they can be applied or offered serially or in parallel.
Of course, the palette an artist in this discipline gets to wield is only as deep as their knowledge of what works where, and why. To this end, the artist needs to have at least a journeyman’s level of comfort with the numbers game. Ideally, to relate to the statisticians and accountability types, it would be best for said artist to be able to speak in terms of business performance for the real toughies. And to fairly represent both sides, the science and objectives guys would be best equipped if they can adjust knowledgably, on-the-fly, based on a full-spectrum understanding of all the artists in the equation have to offer.
What I’m describing here is a cadre of slide-rule Picassos, Newtonian graphic designers, Gatesian Warhols.
I’m describing the technogenic creative team at The Sutter Group.
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Communication’s New Era
A good friend passed along a video yesterday that really struck a chord. The video is about how the world of communication is changing rapidly and it addresses the many different problems and opportunities this creates. It both puts the current landscape into perspective, but also alerts us to the new challenges that will arise in the near future.
One of the challenges is one that we face nearly every day as a marketing communications company: How do we harness these rapid advancements in the quality and quantity of information to help our clients communicate? It’s something we have to think about as we address nearly every project for our clients. And typically, that’s why we’re very careful to do our homework up front in the research and planning phase - this helps us achieve the optimal information architecture. After all, no matter how aesthetically pleasing a solution may be, if the information isn’t organized in a way that makes it easy and intuitive for the consumer to digest there’s no hope the solution will achieve the desired result.
Enjoy the video and let us know what you think:
Apologies for the low-quality video - I’m working on finding it on Vimeo or some other high-definition video source. If you have any leads, let us know!
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